Optimized Vanilla Textures

Optimized Vanilla Textures

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After spending a while with slight stutters and pretty significant fps drops, I figured I should take a look at the game’s textures. Needless to say, I saw quite a few tweaks to be made.

Every tweaked texture included in this mod was handpicked for best performance and visuals. Also, keep in mind that this mod was made to maintain quality while gaining a bit of performance.

List of changes

– Diffuse maps are relatively untouched. Any included ones had their compression fixed and/or were compressed to DXT1a if their alpha was simple enough.

– A few normal maps were reduced in size (flora and oversized normals).

– Smoothness (shine) for a ton of textures was slightly reduced. This provides decent performance gains with next to no loss of quality (compared to reducing diffuse and normal maps, anyway).

Installation

– Drop the extracted contents into your game folder.

– Edit your Fallout4.ini and change the following line:

sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\

to

sResourceDataDirsFinal=STRINGS\, TEXTURES\, MUSIC\, SOUND\, INTERFACE\, MESHES\, PROGRAMS\, MATERIALS\, LODSETTINGS\, VIS\, MISC\, SCRIPTS\, SHADERFX\

Recommended mods

FAR – Faraway Area Reform (LOD) – Proper compression and potential performance improvements for LOD textures. Highly recommended.

Optimized Textures – Only use this if you don’t mind minor to moderate loss of quality. Reduces some 2k diffuse maps to 1k. Provides better visuals than Wasteland 512 but the performance increase won’t be as large.

Wasteland 512 Textures – Only use this if you’re struggling with VRAM. Install it over this for even better performance. Loss of quality will be noticeable due to the downscaled diffuse maps.

Cruz’s Last Resort – Performance Enhancer – Only use this if you’re struggling with performance indoors. Performance is gained by replacing some of the mist and fog meshes with blank ones.

Bonus tips

If you’re annoyed by the game’s texture pop-in like I am, you can set the following into your Fallout4.ini under the general section. Expect a minor performance hit.

iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400 — (default is 1200)
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200 — (default is 600)
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000 — (default is 1500)
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600 — (default is 800)

Example:

[General] sLanguage=en
uGridsToLoad=5
uExterior Cell Buffer=36
bDisableAllGore=0
iTextureUpgradeDistance1=2400
iTextureUpgradeDistance0=1200
iTextureDegradeDistance1=3000
iTextureDegradeDistance0=1600

Shadow distance tweaking is another thing can that improve performance. If you’re using high shadow distance (or greater), you can try the settings below in your Fallout4Prefs.ini.

fShadowDistance=6000.0000 — (default is 14000 for high, 3000 for medium)
fDirShadowDistance=6000.0000 — (default is 14000 for high, 3000 for medium)